EP086: Ali Roohi - My Church is Healthier Because of COVID

All right, we got episode 88 of the Church Digital Podcast powered once again by State of Church Planning. Jeff here. I loved this conversation. We're bringing in a church planter. Hey, churches that have been around for a while getting ready to hang up because it's a church planter, stick around. You need to learn something here because he makes this statement up front. Phenomenal. Ali Ruhi is a church planting around in California, Center Set Church. He says these words: "My church is healthier because of COVID." I'm going to be straight up right here. Listening to you talking to you right now, I have never heard a church say that. "My church is healthier because of COVID." Ali starts to tell stories of engagement rising in his church. Weekend attendance is down. His small groups have tripled. Giving is up. "My church is healthier because of COVID." So let me ask you a question: Is your health? Is your church healthier? Or are you not even sure what's going on in your church? This church, this is why you need to listen to this conversation. Phenomenal stuff. Ali's as a planter is even challenging me on some things like, "Wow, I've never really thought of it that way." And this is the conversation that you need to hear. And this is the approach you're going to have throughout this. So for the conversation, we're bringing in Ali Ruhi once again, lead pastor, summers excuse me, Center Set Church in California. We're bringing in Emily Diaz, project manager with Stadium Church Planning. Emily's co-hosted a number of the Church Digital Podcast here recently. Bringing in myself, Jeff, with the Church Digital and Stadia Church Planning in a conversation that I'm once again reiterating what Ali said: "My church is healthier because of COVID." Okay, everybody, here you go.

Thank you all for this. Hey, you know what, Ali, just maybe even the kick us off, get us started here. Tell us a little about yourself. Tell us your story, ministry story, your church. Tell us a little bit about you.

Yeah, born and raised in a Muslim home. No one in my family is Christian. Funny, I'm actually preaching a sermon on why God exists this week and talk about how my neighbors were one was a Mormon, one was a Buddhist, and one was a Muslim. I didn't meet a Christian until college, and they drank and partied just like I did, and then they wake me up on Sunday morning, "Let's go to church." I'm like, "No, why? Let's sleep in." And their witness was so terrible. It wasn't until my sister just unconditionally loved me. She didn't shove anything down my throat, and she was the first Christian I met, and it started me on a two-year journey. I got saved about 24, later in life, and then I just had what I call encounters with God, burning bush experiences where God was calling me to him at a deeper level each time. And people say, "Why did you plant a church?" And I'm like, "I've been pursuing Jesus passionately for ten years. This is just the expression of that relationship."

My story is interesting because I was a software engineer for fifteen years. I was in the tech world making tech money, and to come out of that was financially hard and emotionally hard because this is the first church I've been on staff at. So I'm learning on the fly how to fly the plane. And it's hard. This is a hard job. But same time it's a calling, so God gives you grace. He gives you empowerment, but it doesn't take away the hardness of it, if that makes sense.

I'm just curious. This isn't even the conversation that I have, but what's so, no church staff experience, you know, and planting a church. What's been the biggest surprise? What's been the thing that you weren't expecting that that's reality for you?

The people management. I just assumed everyone's driven, type A like me, and it's totally not the case at all. What? Yeah, what? It's not. I think learning the Enneagram is helpful, not to project myself onto others. That everyone does not like the direct, in-your-face leadership style. Just learning and growing that people are twos and they can't say no, and saying no for them has helped a lot. Just little things like that.

Let me guess, you're an eight.

Yes, big time.

Me too. We have a room full of eights right now. That's yeah, this is gonna be a scary conversation right here. There's so many aspects of church planning that like seminary does not prepare you for. You almost need an MBA more than a seminary degree. But yeah, that's not neither here until there. So tell us a little bit about your church plant. When you planted, where you're at.

Sure. This September will be three years. Coming up on three years, we're about two and a half years old. We planted in Silicon Valley, so it's like Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Apple. They're all like fifteen minutes away. The people here, what I call, are the most pagan in America or the most unchurched. They're the wealthiest people in America, and they're also the stingiest. It's like those three intersecting. They're the stingiest, the wealthiest, and the most pagan. It's just evidence that the gospel hasn't come in. And where we planted, we have, we planted in an outdoor mall. Think of like Rodeo Drive, LA area, but that version of it in the Bay Area. And then there's a hotel on the strip, and we do church in the hotel. So you can get Gucci and Jesus in the same day if you wanted to. And so we reach a very, very, very affluent community.

There are people in our community that walk to church and they pay sixty-five hundred for a three-bedroom apartment, and they tithe twenty a month. How do you balance that? What tensions are you pulling to try to figure out how to overcome that? Because I mean, yeah, you can't afford that as a church plant, right?

So sure. Are you? I think we asked ten different pastors, ten different answers. What we've discovered is we want to create a place where you can belong before you believe. So a place where they can feel welcome and loved and accepted regardless of where they are on their journey. But in the same way that, you know, God challenges and God, you know, he doesn't leave you the way that you are. His love changes you, even though it's uncomfortable because it's what's best for you. And so we do that primarily through our groups. Our groups are, we train our small group leaders to be pastors. The expectations are super high on, like, you can be a Satan worshiper and join our dream team. There is no salvation requirement to stand by the door and hand out a hello or give out today's bulletin or whatever. Literally, you can be a state worshiper, and some people that would freak them out. It's a place where you can belong before you believe. And as you get deeper and deeper in the organization, the character expectations continue to rise. And I'd say it's the highest for our small group leaders because who they are is going to be replicated in those people. How you do life, those ten or twelve people that are in your group, they're gonna copy you. And we want them that copy being done the right way, if that makes sense.

And so it's a journey. It takes on average of someone to come to our community and to begin to give for the very first time is six months. And so whereas in, let's say, a church in, let's say, the South, they say if you don't tithe, you're not a faithful Christian. Where we say, "Hey, tip. If you've never given to God, throw in a tip. Tip to God." And then we challenge him, "Hey, hey, if you've tipped, let's give consistently and see what happens to your heart." And then the next baby step is, "If you've been given consistently, why not go to a percentage?" And then from a percentage, say, "Hey, how about you try faithfully giving the tithe?" And then I challenge all the Christians who think they're like good with God. Hey, the scriptures have to say sacrificial giving. Let's give above and beyond. Let's bring our offerings to God as well as our tithes and offerings. So I'm challenging everyone in the room. And you can see it. It takes time, but you see the slow growth. And for us in our church, because we're reaching a lot of unchurched people, we celebrate as a staff, "This guy gave fifty bucks," even though we know he's making twenty grand a month. It's just, you got to change the metric for celebration.

The whole "belong before you believe," like that's an interesting phrasing. Often when we look at, when we talk a lot of, obviously church online here on the podcast, a lot of the language there. As a matter of fact, right before I jumped on this, I had this conversation with another guy that people tend to find community before they find Christ. They engage in community in online environments. And so even that "belong before you believe" is an intricate philosophy that makes, I would think, a transition into online ministry helpful because it sounds like you're already thinking in online methods. And maybe you being in the heart of Silicon Valley like really helps toward that.

So totally. What lessons? What observations? What are you seeing through your church plant online? Yeah, so pre-COVID, I knew there was always a percentage of people that would come that really never engaged. So let me give you metrics so you kind of understand what was before and what we're seeing now. Pre-COVID, we were averaging one hundred ninety people. Of those one hundred ninety, we had between fifty-five and sixty-five people in groups. So maybe a third or a fourth, depending on the math, a fourth of our people engaging in small groups. Where that just always felt unhealthy, if that makes sense. But we did have other ways to measure engagement. We had, you know, a dream team where I called people who would serve at least once a month. That was like eighty people, more like about half. And then numerically, you know, the giving was, I'm not sure if I should say numbers, but I'm saying it. It was around, let's say, you know, twenty-four K for a church plant. I'm not sure if I should say this, but I'm saying it.

Post-COVID, right, I knew that there was always a group of people that just came on Sundays, but I never knew what it was. Post-COVID, now those what I call "Sunday-only Christians," they're gone. They don't engage in online worship anymore. And if you want to go look at the data with Barna, one-third of Christians who only came on Sundays, they don't even go to church anymore. And I can see that with the numbers. There was this huge influx of people watching online, and every week after Easter, it's slowly been decreasing. But just because viewership is down doesn't mean engagement is down.

So we literally called everyone the first three weeks that call this church their home and have served and give and said, "Hey, this is going to be for a while the best way that we can shepherd you and guide you along is not just the Sunday. That is the small groups." And so we went from fifty people in groups to about one hundred fifty people in groups within one month. And because we personally called everyone saying, "You got to do this. Don't just YouTube us, because your kid's going to distract you and whatnot." And we went, we had no Zoom groups before, and we went all Zoom groups after. And then financially, for whatever reason, we didn't even ask for it, but we, like a lot of churches say, "Oh, give recurring giving," you know, and they really geared their talks around. We didn't do that. We said, "Hey, for us to continue reaching more people, consider giving. And we always say we're not going to tell you what to give. Pray to God and ask him what he wants you to give."

And March was we were down twenty percent giving. There's just this fear, this anxiety of, like, I'm not sure if you guys remember, but like they had no toilet paper in this country. He couldn't buy bottled water in America. It was crazy. I remember March fifteenth going to Costco and there were five hundred people online ahead of me to get into Costco. And so that fear really showed up financially in

Our church was at 20, but then once the fear started going down, normalcy started coming back, giving increased 20 percent. What it was pre-COVID, and it stayed at that level where we're about 28 thousand dollars every month. It increased five thousand dollars. We didn't do anything. And so the engagement is still a huge factor in terms of people staying with our church.

Now I'll say this: the serving opportunities gone. We needed 40, 50 people to run a Sunday service. That's gone. What do you do with those people? So we decided we need to increase. When we come out of COVID, no one is going to give a damn what we preached on in our community. I'm sorry if I said that word. No one cares. Unchurched people don't care about your sermon series. They care about how you love them during the worst event of their lifetime.

And so we created what's called free groceries. You literally go to our website, sign up for free groceries, hundred dollars worth of groceries, and we'll get you. You don't have to go to our church, and we'll drop them off at your house. Why? Because we want to be known as a community by what we give, not what we take. And those people were planting seeds in their heart for when we get out of this thing, because we will. And even now, potentially for them to want to engage in community.

We've seen that people have come to our church because of the way that we've served them. For our kids, the biggest pain point among their team is, "Man, our kids are driving me insane." So we said, "What can we do for the parents to make this time easier?" So we every month we make a box for the kids of toys, of crafts, and things that. And we do a sign up online, and we have parents every month that don't even go to our church like, "Oh my gosh, thank you for doing this." And we'll drop it off at their house. Again, why? Because we want to be known in our community by what we give, not by what we take.

No one is going to watch our sermons online when they're there. Are those people that we share a YouTube video or you share a Facebook video and they watch it and accept Christ? We've seen that. We've seen close to 30 people accept Christ in COVID. 20 of those people have joined our church. We've baptized three of them. So there's still growth, but it's not at the same level it was when we were in a building. It's different. These are people that we have personal relationships with.

So if personal evangelism is primary, these are people that were serving in the community. There's not a touch point before this, the YouTube video. They're not going to come. And so what we've seen is the Sunday is the Sunday service important? Yes. Are groups important? Yes. Of serving the community? Yes. But it's all three. You can't just be a one-trick pony anymore.

And rich people, and that's been the tough part for us as a church. If we really believe serving the community and groups, we've got to give resources and time and energy. So we've actually taken people away from the Sunday service and said, "Go serve here. We'd rather have this be average and these be lifted up from terrible to good." Does that make sense what I'm saying?

Oh yeah, there's so much wisdom off of you. What you just said, Emily, you're going to ask a question?

Yeah, so I'd hear your numbers about groups, right? So before you had around 50, now you have triple that number, 150, which is mind-blowing, the multiplication of that over such a short time. So what do you think it is in your community that is created just this? It seems like there's just like this yearning for people to be together.

Well, I would say if you look at the unique people that would go to groups at any point in the last year, that number was around 80 or 90. But actively in groups right before COVID was around 55. And it's like, "Well, why did it go from 55 to 150?" And the I would ask that question, and one of the main reasons, and maybe it's just us in Silicon Valley, is the commute time was a massive killer.

So imagine the average commute time is about an hour to go to work. You work. If you work an eight-hour day in Silicon Valley, you're probably unemployed. Imagine you're coming home. You haven't seen your wife and your kids all day. You're walking through the door at 6:30 because you just spent an hour and a half in traffic. You eat dinner, kiss your kids, blah blah, and then you go to group. It's a drive again to group. That was hard, taxing on people.

In my mind, like, "Why didn't we ever do online groups before?" And so most of our groups are at 8 PM when all the kids are asleep because we did. We designed it so that the parents could participate without needing a babysitter. And literally overnight, people said, "I don't have to drive. I don't need to worry about my kids. I can spend two hours with them before coming to group. This is a no-brainer. I want to be a part of this." And then there was that sense of like, "Oh my gosh, I miss people. I want to be around people." There's a huge number of people that they can't get that on Sundays anymore. So they needed to go. We encouraged them to go to groups to get that. Yeah, at least that's what we've seen.

So then as a church planter, leadership development, like you said, even in your area, it takes the longest amount of time to develop a small group leader. You have an explosion in the amount of attendees. How did you handle having sufficient amount of small group leaders to lead these groups?

Yeah, so we have been training them constantly. It's almost like there's a bunch of people that were ready. One of my philosophies is you have to have people. You have to have the skeleton before the growth. You have to have the leaders before God can bring the people. It's not the other way around. Sometimes we think, "Oh God, if you just brought more people, I would develop more leaders." No, no, no. God won't overwhelm you with things that you can't handle.

And every time that we've had growth is because we've done the hard work. Like, for example, if you believe it's going to rain, go buy an umbrella. If you believe God's going to grow your church, go develop leaders so that he can give you that growth. And so we have painstakingly, a year before COVID, intentionally asked our life group leaders, "Your job is not to shepherd people. It's also to find an apprentice." So we went from probably 12 to 13 group leaders to 24 group leaders over the course of a year.

So we like we were preparing for growth, not knowing how it was going to happen. And so where those leaders come from? Most of them were developed right before COVID over the course of six to nine months prior. So we were positioned for this growth, believing God was going to bring it. We didn't know he's going to do it through COVID, but that's how it is. If you're waiting to grow leaders in COVID, it's already too late.

Love, love the apprentice angle. We've talked a lot about that previously. The thing that really surprised me that I'm like, "I don't know that I've heard of that before," um, the free groceries thing. So you're doing the groups, that's a piece, servings of the piece you're trying to be not just a one-trick pony. Talk to me about the free groceries. Tell me some stories out of the free groceries, serving the people that are receiving. I want to know more about that.

So I served at the Dream Center probably 10 years ago with Matthew Barnett, blown away by what he was doing. Took a bunch of high schoolers there. I've been to Mexico, Turkey, Jordan, a bunch of countries, student mission trips that you see the practical need. It's not just that you're sharing evangelism. You're meeting practical needs in a way that people don't forget what you did for them.

There's that principle of reciprocity. If you scratch my back, I'm going to remember and want to scratch your back one day. Those people remember when you serve them unconditionally. It doesn't mean they're gonna come to Christ, but they remember that church. "I don't agree with what they believe, but man, they love me like Jesus did."

And in a valley that's the most pagan, like people are antagonistic towards God here, it's not that I'm trying to convert them to Christianity on day one. I'm just trying to take them from a negative four to a negative three. You know, that's my goal, honestly, just bring them a little bit closer.

Groceries do that. And so we got, I'll be honest, we got emailed a lot about, "Can we help with rent? I just got, I lost my job. My business is gone. Can you help with rent?" And I'm like, "Guys, we're a church plant. I wish I could do that. We don't have the benevolence for that, those kinds of things. But I don't want you to worry about groceries. I don't want you worry about food. Hopefully unemployment will help you. Hopefully you can find another job, Uber or something, but at least you have food on the table."

And the idea behind it was, "Could we be, could we show mercy and compassion in a time of chaos?" And then the initial reaction is, "Should we do this for a community?" And I said, "Guys, what if we didn't care who we gave it to? What if we, like Jesus, served 5,000 people a meal and knowing a lot of them are only there because they want you to be Burger King and not the King of Kings? And we said, 'Let's just do it. Let's be like Jesus and give away resources that are not going to help us grow, but it's going to help the kingdom. It's going to help the name of Jesus.'" And that was the primary motivation: was let's be generous for the sake of being generous.

You had to tweet that one. They want you to be Burger King, yeah, the King of Kings. That was good. I got a quote. I got to give credit. That's Stephen Ferguson about 10 years ago. I'll give you guys. I've never forgotten that quote. It's so good.

It's good. I love the idea, you know, "Hey, you know, I don't want to get a negative four to ten. I want to get negative four to negative three. Let's let's just start that conversation, get him engaged in that community, and then negative two, the negative one."

Yeah, if I could tell you that was the primary reason our church grew in the very beginning, a year before we started our Sunday services, we went to this what's called the Santa Clara Art Wine Fest. It's the largest outdoor festival in Silicon Valley. 50,000 people come out. They drink. They get drunk. Imagine a bunch of Christians bought a booth in this chaos, like the Bay Area's version of Mardi Gras, and we bought a booth and we had probably four or five thousand dollars worth of prizes and gifts that we just gave away over the course of two days.

And people would come in and they're like, "Why are you doing this?" "We just want to love the community." "No, no, stop. Why are you doing this?" "No, that's literally the reason. We just want to love our community." It was like unfathomable for these people that we were there without a hook. We were there for a reason. Like, "Where's your church?" "I'm like, we haven't started yet." "Stop, you're lying to me."

And then we had a board that said, "I would go to church if dot dot," and we just left it blank. It's like a six by four, six foot by four foot, like whiteboard. And as we engage in conversation, people would go to the board. I'm telling you, over the course of two days from eight to eight, this festival was at, uh, we had probably close to a thousand, like 900 people come to our booth.

We met two atheists, and the reason why it's significant is because prior to launching, the number of family, the number of friends, the number of pastors says, "Don't do this, Allie. You make good tech money. This valley is godless. They don't want Jesus." And after that festival, it was literally the exact opposite. There were hundreds of people that wanted to come to church, but the reasons why they wrote down was, "You guys just yell at me. The service is too long. The music sucks. And the pastor isn't funny. Like, he takes himself too seriously." He's like, "Dude, those are so easy."

They were literally telling you what kind of church they wanted. They just were saying, "I don't want the angry, judgmental, 'Make America Great Again' pastor with the church preaching down at his people" kind of person. It's like that's so easy. I wear skinny. I'm not even white. Like, come on, you know?

I'm not saying that like you have to be a non-white person. I don't mean to say that, but like the vast majority of people in our church that come are not, and they just wanted representation of someone who looked like them. We hear that all the time, and I'll just be transparent: I get forty-year-old white guys that walk into my church every week and they walk right out. They don't even say goodbye to me because I'm not what they want. And I, I'm okay with that. And one of the reasons why we're growing is because I'm not a white guy from Texas. I look like my community, and I don't yell at them. I just love them, and they keep coming back. And then they love it so much they bring their friends.

So like, I can tell you, there was a girl. One of my favorite stories: eighteen-year-old. I preached at a Hispanic youth group like six months before we launched, and this eighteen-year-old girl was captivated by our story, my wife and I's story. He said, "I want to join your church." I'm like, "You're eighteen."

She's like, "So? I want to come. Like, let's go." This girl loved our life-giving Sunday service so much she brought her sister and her sister's cousin, and neither these two girls were Christian. I guess they had been going to Catholic church for like three or four years because their grandmother would take them. Within a month, they accept Christ. Then they bring their husbands. These two cousins and their husbands sit there. Like, that's how I know when you're not a believer: you have your arms crossed. That's why I lead with a lot of jokes because I'm trying to uncross your arms, trying to get you to physically open up so you can. It takes time. Within three months, both one of the husbands accepts Christ, gets baptized. Six months ago, the second husband got baptized, and now he's one of my top leaders.

I can tell you, like, here's the story: seven degrees of Kevin Bacon. I can tell you there's twenty people in our church that have gotten saved and baptized because of that one eighteen-year-old girl. No kidding. The fact that we go to an art wine festival, love the fact that we were so generous. She was like the primary cause to bring two people that brought ten people. It's just like crazy, crazy. You can't buy a billboard. You can't buy mailers that do that stuff. Um, if you just love your community, they're gonna come.

It's almost like we were doing church without the queen before that language, and once the Sunday service started up again, it's like, "Oh my gosh, our engagement with the community started falling off because we didn't have the resources for it because it was so geared towards the Sunday." And now that the Sunday is gone, it's like that gear, that engine of our church is back again. It's like, "Oh my gosh, we're serving the church the way we were supposed to be. Oh my gosh, I'm sorry, God, for dropping the ball on this." And so it feels like our church became healthier because of COVID, and we were unhealthy before COVID. And I'm grateful.

Think of it. We're going to call that the title of this: "My church is healthier because of COVID." I've ever heard in this five months, however long it's been at this point, one hundred twenty plus states. I don't think I've ever heard somebody say that your church is healthier because of this pandemic. It's called into attention, and you've been able. I had an unhealthy obsession with the Sunday. Oh my God, I had an unhealthy obsession with a Sunday. When I inspire people on Sunday, but they're going to grow in groups, and we're really not going to reach the community with mailers and billboards. It's by the way we serve them, and we had that was missing. And so by God taking our queen away—because God's the one who's in control—we can either get angry and protest like a bunch of Christians are, or say God or the enemy meant for evil, you're going to use for good, and say, "What are you trying to teach me in this season, Lord?"

And we pivoted, and the guys that are protesting are not pivoting. And so we've used the season. It forced us to get healthy again. Um, so I'm grateful for it. Honestly, if COVID ends tomorrow with a vaccine, we will not stop doing those things that we've begun doing. Um, and we will. I mean, there's always that pull, right, to go back to the Sunday. But we've learned our lesson, hopefully, to not go back to having eighty people serve on the Sunday service and having no one serving the community. And so I can foresee us when we go back having caps. We don't need thirty-five people. More than thirty-five serve somewhere else. And in the same way we call people to go to groups, call them and say, "Hey, can you serve here? You're this. This is just as important as a Sunday service."

So when you talked about the different aspects of your church, it reminds me of the Great Commission Engine, which I think you're familiar with, Ali, right? It's the Great Commission Engine. It talks about the Sunday service. It talks about serving, and it talks about relationships, right? And in our training, we talk about how you've got to have all three of those pistons running, right, to really build momentum and push a church forward in a healthy way. But most of the time what we see in churches is an emphasis on one of those different aspects. And so when I hear you talk about that and hear that this COVID season has brought you to a healthy place, it seems like God has equalized those pistons within your church, and that has caused great momentum for you guys.

Yeah, I didn't know you knew the intentional language. Intentional Church's language. Um, yeah, the Great Commission Engine. And what's so funny is we started with groups and serving. We didn't even have the first piston, which is the Sunday. And it, and I'm sure a lot of guys online will tell you, pastors will tell you, even though you know about the Great Commission Engine, the Sunday service becomes so important. It's like this magnetic pull, and everyone, even you, lean that way. And so one of the ways that we've, we know coming out of COVID, is before we hire a small group pastor or a Sunday production person to run the Sunday service, we're going to need a community service pastor. And so they're financially, we need to. If it's important to us, the only way that we won't go back to what we were pre-COVID is if we have resources going there financially towards a person championing that cause, because it will naturally drift back.

Totally. You're so right. Let me ask this because we're going to build on the Great Commission Engine. It's one of the pistons. By the way, Great Commission, some of the listeners may not know that's Intentional Church's. We had Doug Parks on the podcast just recently talking about discipleship processes and church's platform, and I'm really fascinated by the Great Commission Engine. But one of the pistons is catalytic experiences. You mentioned earlier, as you were kind of going through your intro, this idea of encounters with God, a burning bush experience. Um, in this COVID environment, there physical is not a thing. Physical may kind of be a thing. People, the ones using Doug Parks's language, the ones don't really want to go to the building. So evangelically, the queen has kind of lost her luster in the physical building. And so we're doing services online with you. You're engaging in serving with the community through free groceries. Community groups are reaching out. Small groups are reaching out to engage. Like, you're working the pistons from different levels right now in this COVID season. What is the catalytic like? What is this catalytic experience? What are the catalytic service? What is this burning bush experience? What does this look like? Does this happen with your online experiences? Are you seeing it happen in other ways? Kind of talk to me. What the role of the service is for your church?

Yeah, our Sunday service, uh, has from the very beginning been our primary, uh, like what you just described, our catalytic experience where someone can come and hear the basic gospel presentation in a relevant, creative way. That hasn't shifted. But what has shifted is now our Sunday services is all this is going to sound offensive, and that's okay. It's, you know, you go on Netflix every Christmas and the fireplace. You can play a fireplace for four hours. It sounds like a fireplace. It looks like a fireplace. And then you play Christians using the background, and you know, fire. Like, "Oh my gosh, we have a fire in our house." And that's what I feel like online church has become. It looks like a fire. It sounds like a fire. It just doesn't have the heat of the fire.

And uh, I can tell you our viewership is way higher. The people that engage with our Sunday service pre-COVID was like two hundred people, adults. It's like eight hundred, nine hundred right now every week consistently. Um, salvations are still happening, just not at the rate it was before. And so when I asked my community, like, "Hey, how are you engaging with church?" The vast majority of them are distracted while they're watching church. They have their cell phone in their hand, and they're engaging church on their laptop or their TV, which means their hands are free to like surf, or their kids are running around. So that, like, it's a distracted church experience. This idea where people would come into a room and they had no distractions, we'd turn the lights low, the lights would go on the stage, they're uninterrupted for thirty minutes. Those days are gone. I cannot hold your attention for forty-five minutes. That's how long I would preach pre-COVID, and now I've brought it down to twenty-eight minutes. Why? Because the attention span is gone. Our services today are fifty minutes, whereas pre-COVID they're about an hour and ten.

Why? Because it's impossible to hold someone's attention for an hour where their kids are running around there and they're half of them are in their pajamas. It's like you can still have that encounter with God. It just looks very, very different. Um, it's more of a, I would say, I'm we're a spiritual TED Talk now. A little bit of worship, TED Talk. And the hope is that it's just one step, not the only step. Again, I'm taking them from a negative three to a negative two. I still do a gospel presentation at the end of my sermon every single week. "Hey, if you wanna receive Christ, blah blah." But it just, it's different. If that makes sense, it's not the same. And so you, we have to adjust. I can't preach and have the same service as pre-COVID inside online church. Online church is totally different. And even with our short services, the amount that people engage, the data tells you, like, "Oh, this number of people sign off after this amount of time." As soon as I'm done praying, everyone logs off. No one wants to hear what everyone. I can say there's a free car waiting in the parking lot, and no one will be there to hear that after I'm done praying because they're gone. And you can see people skip out in the first ten minutes because they don't want to be in worship, and they only hope for the sermon. And as soon as the sermon is done, they go. They leave.

Yeah, and so it's, do we only release a TED Talk? We've wrestled with that. Do we become like a Jimmy Kimmel or we have a studio audience kind of RSVP and show up and they're there for the taping and then we release the video a couple days later? I don't know, man. I'm not sure I'm qualified today. But it's changing, and I love when God uses these seasons to stretch us and push the boundaries of what is acceptable because usually it's some dude who thinks that Harry Potter's demonic, and it's not, and you're watering down the church. And we're still preaching the gospel. It's just different. The message is still the...

Same, the methods are changing. I love it. I love the tension of it not being what it was twenty years ago. I mean, you're asking healthy questions and the questions you're asking, I've heard from other churches that are wrestling with that same thing. They're seeing where the online service, you know, is reaching the ninety-nines, but it's not reaching the ones. And even if it does, is worship, online worship, church service work? I'm telling you, they skip it on purpose. And so we've wrestled with, do we just cut it out? But it's funny, like I've had that conference because I've started, you know, kind of throwing that in, hey, you know, is anybody else saying this? Other churches are seeing this. And once again, that's another hugely controversial idea where you want to, you want to do church without, you know, corporate worship. You have to. Oh, so I'm in California and the backdrop is Gavin Newsom, our governor, made singing illegal. I'm like, who the heck cares? Who the heck cares? Not gonna stop Jesus. Come on. And there's thousands of Christians protesting, oh my gosh, we're being persecuted. It's like, guys, this is not first. No one has held a gun to us. No one's died because we're a Christian yet. Please, this is like complaining that the Wi-Fi went out. These are first-world problems. And honestly, if you want to look at the data, people don't want worship that are non-Christians, and our service, our church is geared towards reaching the anonymous. If you want to get deep, there's a, there's seminaries worth of free information on iTunes University. You can get a yearly membership to a unit for one hundred ten bucks. You don't need the Sunday service to do that. I'm not here to spoon-feed you. If you need that, that means you're a baby and you need someone else to change your diapers too. Let's really go into what that is. Our Sunday servers are geared towards lost people, and we're wrestling with, do we cut out worship because the ninety-nine can go get, go listen to five hours of Elevation all somewhere else? That's beautiful. I love it. There's other ways to solve the problem, which is ultimately, you know, the hurdle we're running into. So churches, be open to thinking different towards some of these things. I love Ali's passion and just honestly his approach here. I'm still stuck on this: my church is healthier mid-COVID than it was before. I honestly don't think I've heard one church ever say that. So thank you, thank you, just even for that.

Hey, we're going to wrap up, and I feel like I could do like a whole other conversation here. Maybe as we get further on down the road, maybe we'll get an update and see what's what's going on with the church. But just as we're landing the plane, Emily, any closing thoughts on your side?

I just appreciate your perspective, Ali, and your humility, right, to evaluate with the way that we did church and our focus pre-COVID and how God is forming and shaping you as a leader and then therefore your church to be a much healthier, more robust church that is having even a greater impact in your community. So good for you, and thank you for being an example to other church leaders and church planters for us.

I didn't see it that way, but thank you. It's been stressful.

She's incredible, right? Like one of the best project managers at Stadia. There's four of them, so she's at least, at least good. Good stuff, Ali. As we're landing the plane, any closing thoughts on your side?

No, I'm just thankful for Stadia. So much of my success in the pre-service and the pre-launch phase was them. And even after I launched, you guys have been so instrumental in challenging me, pushing me. A lot of these, like I'm not this silo leader sitting on top of a hill like a monk by myself processing these things. There are guys that I have on speed dial in the Stadia that I call and like, hey, I don't care that you want to have coffee with your wife, answer this question for me. And so this is me saying thank you to Stadia, not just pre-launch because you guys helped me launch, but even after when COVID hit, you guys were giving time and energy to help me process these things. I there's no way that I can take credit for my solutions when you guys were instrumental in helping me get to those solutions. So thank you, guys.

Well said, right there. I don't know that I could put anything more on that. Having, you know, Stadia's launch celebrated their one-thousandth church plant here recently, gearing up for another thousand, you know, in the coming days. You've heard me talk more, the audience has, about digital-only church planting, and we're starting a cohort of planting a digital-only expression of choice, starting in August. And so the passion for Stadia to empower more people like you, Ali, to do the things that you're doing, the fresh, I'll just be honest, to me it's exciting. It's invigorating because it's a fresh approach. It's a guy who's looking at the slate and saying, hey, you know what, we're healthier now than we were before. Like, so we need these things that we're changing. Let's keep them that way. That's a conversation that honestly a lot of existing churches, they struggle with some of that, that transparency from you. And even me, you've challenged me in serving and you've challenged me in services, and I'm a guy who's used to challenging other people. So like, this is an exciting conversation and approach. And the thing that I love about Stadia is their desire to enable others to get out there and challenge and stretch and do things with a different perspective by helping to plant new churches as well, not to mention the huge need for new churches in this society that that's today. So hey, man, thanks for jumping on the podcast to be here. You know, we'll put, Ali, if you got questions for him, we'll put his social media stuff in the show notes as well as links to Intentional Churches and some of the other things that we talked about, but for Emily, for Ali, this is Jeff at the Church Digital and Stadia Church Planting. Thanks for being here today. We'll see you next time here on the podcast. You all have a good day.